It is unclear if Kerry Jackson, the “gobby woman” (by her own admission) at the centre of this discomforting comedy, is villain, antihero or something else altogether. An Essex-born Thatcher’s child living in gentrified Walthamstow, east London, she dreams of making her new tapas bar into a roaring success. She is a leave voter who hates the neighbourhood’s homeless man Will (Michael Fox), threatens her black chef Athena (Madeline Appiah) with deportation, fawns over Stephen (Michael Gould), the white, middle-class man who she hopes will write her a restaurant review, and thinks getting raped in her youth was her own fault for being drunk. On the plus side, she has brass, humour and loves a boogie.
Written by April De Angelis and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, this drama seems built on a thought experiment: what would happen if Kerry (Fay Ripley), an unlikely character to be placed at the heart of a comedy, were surrounded by her ideological opposites? But an interesting thought experiment does not always make for an interesting drama, as this production proves.
